Physics
esiegel | March 31, 2011"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow
Some people are never satisfied. After I wrote last time on the odds for cosmic inflation, I started noticing a flurry of comments on an older post about alternatives to the big bang. So, might as well go back to the basics, and ask what the odds are that the Big Bang is correct! Let's start by taking a look at what's out there in the Universe.
Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope.
Sure, we've got stars surrounding us: hundreds of…
jhalper | March 30, 2011Today's Weizmann Institute news stories include two new papers from the prolific lab of Prof. Yadin Dudai. The first is on a protein that boosts memory in rats. Dudai and his group have been investigating this protein for several years. Previously, they had managed to show that blocking the protein, even for a very short time, erases memories. Now, they have demonstrated that adding more of the protein to certain areas of the brain can strengthen memory. Note: They increased the protein via gene-carrying viruses that infiltrated the rats' brain cells - not a clinic-ready technique. But until…
drorzel | March 27, 2011Occasional commenter Evan Murphy emailed to bring my attention to Siege Toys, a new venture that aims to make desktop snap-together wooden trebuchets. Why? Because medieval siege warfare engines are awesome.
They're looking for funding via Kickstarter, so if you've ever wanted your very own trebuchet, go place a pre-order. And lest you think this is a complete lark, their web page includes this design note:
We spent a solid month and a half adjusting the prototype after figuring out the rough dimensions on a 4th-order runge-kutta simulator that I wrote a year and a half ago.
So, you know,…
esiegel | March 25, 2011"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." -Frank Zappa
Oh yeah, Zappa? Well, let me show you what hydrogen can do!
With just one proton and one electron, hydrogen is not only the simplest of all the atoms in the Universe, it's also the most abundant: over 90% of all the atoms in the Universe are hydrogen atoms!
How could such a small thing possibly have anything interesting to tell us about the entire Universe…
esiegel | March 23, 2011"I came from the country, and when I came to the city, I was ridin' high, you know. I was seeing more lights than I ever dreamed to shine in the world. 'Cos where I came from, there wasn't too many lights. Bugs made a lot of light, but after that there wasn't no lights." -John Hunter
John Hunter should have been at a higher latitude! Because if you're fortunate, at a high enough latitude (either north or south), the following sight will sometimes greet you in the night sky.
Image credit: Thundafunda.com.
In the northern hemisphere, we call it the Aurora Borealis, while the southern gets the…
drorzel | March 23, 2011I am less enthralled by the "molecular gastronomy" thing than someone with my geek credentials ought to be. As a result, I was a little disappointed when I clicked the link (from Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter) to this Wired story about a new tv show called Marcel's Quantum Kitchen. Because, you know, there are much more fun things that the combination of "Quantum" and "Kitchen" could evoke:
A kitchen whose dishes all come in discrete and indivisible portions. You can't eat half and take the other half home-- it's all or nothing...
You can either know what you're making, or how long it will…
jhalper | March 22, 2011
Is having a beer and sandwich at the local pub the best way to improve your brain awareness? At least in the city of Rehovot one evening last week, those eating and drinking in a few select establishments got to hear Weizmann Institute neurobiology graduate students give informal talks and demonstrations. The event was a part of Brain Awareness week, an annual, international affair. The aim is not really to make people more aware of their brains (or their brains more aware), but to promote brain research.
Some participated in an experiment in which they found that a smell can help imprint…
esiegel | March 21, 2011"And Lord, we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream." -Homer Simpson
If you've been reading or watching the news, you've probably been hearing a whole lot of information about the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.
And how the recent earthquake and tsunami have combined to turn the above scene into a potential disaster.
At present, however, contamination has been minimal, and the damage -- thus far -- has been practically zero.
What do I mean? Let's explain -- in the simplest terms possible…
drorzel | March 18, 2011Just a quick reminder that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk (same basic one from Tuesday night) as part of the Saturday Morning Science program (pdf) at the University of Toledo tomorrow, Saturday the 19th. The talk will be at 9:30, with breakfast beforehand. If you're in the vicinity, stop by and hear about some cool physics. My cold is starting to improve slightly, so I should be audible, and I've added at least one Ohio-related joke to the talk, so you don't want to miss that.
In only vaguely related news-- indeed, it's probably only of active…
esiegel | March 16, 2011"It is said that there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the Universe is the ultimate free lunch." -Alan Guth
We've talked about the Big Bang too many times to count, and why it's easily the leading theory regarding the origin of the Universe. It's the only cosmic idea we have that can explain all three of the following observations:
1.) The Hubble Expansion of the Universe. When we look out at distant galaxies, we find that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it's receding from us! It was realized pretty early on that this is because space itself is expanding!
This means that…
esiegel | March 14, 2011"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." -Jeannette Rankin
As you all surely know, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake just struck Japan, devastating the island of Honshu.
Before and after images link at abc.net.au.
Ask a geologist, and they'll rightly tell you about plate tectonics, subduction zones, fault lines, and much, much more. But there's a simple physics reason that they happen underlying all of it.
Image credit: Jean Anastasia.
The Earth is built like a giant, spherical layer cake. The inner core -- made up of mostly iron and nickel -- is the densest of all the layers…
drorzel | March 14, 2011Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it's time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can't-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click for the full bracket):
OK, maybe there are a few bugs yet to be worked out with this method...
drorzel | March 14, 2011I've still got work to do today, but I did want to pop in quickly to note that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium, at SUNY New Paltz. It's part of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association meeting, and has also been plugged in the local paper.
If you're in the area, and looking for something interesting to do, stop by and say hi, and learn a bit about why quantum physics matters to the dog on the go.
drorzel | March 11, 2011I've got three months to decide. I'll be giving an invited talk at the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) with this title, with a goal of introducing the field to students and physicists from other fields:
In recent years, DAMOP has expanded to the point where the meeting can be quite daunting for a first-time attendee. This talk will provide an introduction to some of the most exciting current areas of research in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics, intended to help undergraduates, beginning graduate students, or physicists from other fields attending their first…
drorzel | March 9, 2011As a sort of follow-on from yesterday's post, thinking about the issues involved reminded me of a couple of browser tabs that I've had open for a while, namely this story about an education session at the AAAS meeting, and this Inside Higher Ed article on "Teaching Ambiguity". From the IHE piece:
Tidy may be comforting, but it is also banal, boring, conventional and unrealistic. That's why I have been asking faculty to infuse their classes with the element of surprise. By surprise I do not mean mysteriously taking a rabbit out of a hat, but rather incorporating experimental, untidy open-ended…
esiegel | March 4, 2011"The subject of gambling is all encompassing. It combines man's natural play instinct with his desire to know about his fate and his future." -Franz Rosenthal
Last month, Sean Carroll asked the blogosphere to give their personal odds on whether various theories will turn out to be true or not.
And so I thought it would be a lot of fun to take a look at some of the best theories or most renowned theories and ideas out there today, and to tell you, if I were a Las Vegas bookmaker, what are the odds I would give you on various ideas. (If you know of an idea you want my odds on, leave it in the…
kcollins | March 2, 2011How scientifically accurate are today's Hollywood superhero and sci-fi movies? Surprisingly accurate, says physicist James Kakalios, He should know - he's author of the widely known book, The Physics of Superheroes, which examines such things. In this video clip (below) from the 2010 Festival, Dr. Kakalios talks about what makes recent movies like Iron Man so scientifically "right on" and appealing.
Dr. Kakaios also has a new book that has just come out. Check out "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics" with Engineering.com at the 2010 USA Science and Engineering Festival.
drorzel | March 2, 2011Another shameless self-promotion post, but since I was confirming some arrangements this morning, I thought I'd throw up a post, so:
- On March 15, two weeks from yesterday, I will be giving a talk for the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association at 8pm on the campus of SUNY-New Paltz. If you're in the downstate NY sort of area, and want to know what your dog should know about quantum physics, stop on by.
- On March 19th, two weeks from this Saturday, I will be doing the same presentation at 9:30 am at the University of Toledo, as part of their Saturday Morning Science program (warning: PDF). If…
esiegel | March 1, 2011"There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good." -Stephen Colbert
Let me start by telling you a story about an old problem. Take a look at the planet Mercury, one of the five planets (not counting Earth) visible in our night sky to the naked eye.
And I can see some of you at home squinting at your screen, asking why I'm showing you a picture of the Moon right after sunset. Well, Mercury's in that picture, I promise. Let me make it a little easier for you.
No less a naked-eye astronomer than Copernicus had difficulty seeing the planet Mercury, and…
drorzel | March 1, 2011Blogging will continue to be minimal, as I'm buried in grading, and feeling significant time pressure regarding the book-in-progress. I thought I'd pop up briefly, though, to provide a look at the current status of the book-in-progress.
The way this process works (or at least has worked for me) is that I write up a proposal describing what I plan to write about and giving some samples. For both books, this has included one full chapter worth of prospective text, plus a bunch of dog dialogues for other chapters. My agent then shops this around to publishers, one of whom buys it and sets a…